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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  10hr ago (text post)   85 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 27, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Been trying my hand at proper photo editing this week. Over Christmas I took thousands of shots in RAW format, whittled them down to a chosen hundred, and am now only starting to edit them properly. I've been taking it quite seriously, checking the histogram as I go along for dynamic range, trying to do proper colour balancing, and so on. It's quite surprising how long it takes; it's not uncommon for me to spend hours on a photo before I'm satisfied.

Here is an album of my completed photos thus far. There's not much there yet due to how time-consuming the process is; currently I have seven photos down, with ninety-three more to go.

I never really realized how much work goes into post-processing photos. I usually just click on my phone, upload it and forget about it. And the quality is not bad, modern phones have pretty decent software. But compared to something done by somebody who knows what they're doing, you can really see the difference.

These look really professional. I particularly like the one on the Great Wall.

Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.

/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).

This is not as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.

I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).

I wonder how this process actually works? It does not feel scalable. It would take a person likely a couple of days at least to go through 100k+ page text, especially if they want to pay proper attention. From what I read online, agents receive thousands submissions per year. Clearly, there must be some filters. I can guess "previously famous author" and "the guy I know or that somebody I know vouched for" are the obvious ones, but what comes next?

Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter doesn't strike them as compelling.

I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.

One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.

The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?

About 83,000 words.

I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?

It's SF, actually.

Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.

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